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Page 9
For example, you have a desire for culture. You haven't the means to
indulge in very much, but you would like a little. You are immediately
beset by all the eager Matthew Arnolds who have heard of your desire,
and they insist that you should at once devote yourself to the knowledge
of the best that has been known and said in the world. All this is very
fine, but you don't see how you can afford it. Isn't there a little of a
cheaper quality that they could show you? Perhaps the second best would
serve your purpose. At once you are covered with reproaches for your
philistinism.
You had been living a rather prosaic life and would like to brighten it
up with a little poetry. What you would really like would be a modest
James Whitcomb Riley's worth of poetry. But the moment you express the
desire the University Extension lecturer insists that what you should
take is a course of lectures on Dante. No wonder that you conclude that
a person in your circumstances will have to go without any poetry at
all.
It is the same way with efforts at social righteousness. You find it
difficult to engage in one transaction without being involved in others
that you are not ready for. You are interested in a social reform that
involves collective action. At once you are told that it is socialistic.
You do not feel that it is any worse for that, and you are quite willing
to go on. But at once your socialistic friends present you with the
whole programme of their party. It is all or nothing. When it is
presented in that way you are likely to become discouraged and fall back
on nothing.
Now, if we had a circulating medium you would express the exact state of
your desires somewhat in this way: "Here is my moral dollar. I think I
will take a quarter's worth of Socialism, and twelve and a half cents'
worth of old-time Republicanism, and twelve and a half cents of genuine
Jeffersonian democracy, if there is any left, and a quarter's worth of
miscellaneous insurgency. Let me see, I have a quarter left. Perhaps I
may drop in to-morrow and see if you have anything more that I want."
The sad state of my good friend Bagster arises from the fact that he
can't do one good thing without being confused by a dozen other things
which are equally good. He feels that he is a miserable sinner because
his moral dollar is not enough to pay the national debt.
But though we have not yet been able adequately to extend the notion of
money to the affairs of the higher life, there have been those who have
worked on the problem.
That was what Socrates had in mind. The Sophists talked eloquently about
the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; but they dealt in these things in
the bulk. They had no way of dividing them into sizable pieces for
everyday use. Socrates set up in Athens as a broker in ideas. He dealt
on the curb. He measured one thing in terms of another, and tried to
supply a sufficient amount of change for those who were not ashamed to
engage in retail trade.
Socrates draws the attention of Ph�drus to the fact that when we talk of
iron and silver the same objects are present to our minds, "but when any
one speaks of justice and goodness, there is every sort of disagreement,
and we are at odds with one another and with ourselves."
What we need to do he says is to have an idea that is big enough to
include all the particular actions or facts. Then, in order to do
business, we must be able to divide this so that it may serve our
convenience. This is what Socrates called Philosophy.
"I am a great lover," he said, "of the processes of division and
generalization; they help me to speak and think. And if I find any man
who is able to see unity and plurality in nature, him I follow, and walk
in his steps as if he were a god."
Even in the Forest of Arden life was not so simple as at first it
seemed. The shepherd's life which "in respect of itself was a good life"
was in other respects quite otherwise. Its unity seemed to break up into
a confusing plurality. Honest Touchstone, in trying to reconcile the
different points of view, blurted out the test question, "Hast any
philosophy in thee, Shepherd?" After Bagster has communed with Chocorua
for six months, I shall put that question to him.
THE CONTEMPORANEOUSNESS OF ROME
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